Lincoln Jaques
The snows on Heinzelova smother all the tarmac broken by the lorries, now silent themselves. I’ll go back one day, walk past the Bila supermarket where I tried to speak the little Croatian I could muster to the girl on the checkout while you laughed, slightly embarrassed. I’ll walk past the traffic lights where that Christmas street kids pressed their cold palms on car windows between jumping over puddles to keep warm. The winds on Heinzelova so strong one could not light a cigarette one could not form words or keep their fingers warm. At dusk the stars fell into our pockets shrapnel of my own life. Allow me to say farewell, for we rarely ever get that chance. Farewell! We forget so many times. My tears replace the stars as night falls and nothing of us left now but the snow.
Lincoln Jaques holds a Master of Creative Writing from AUT. His poetry, fiction and travel writing has appeared in journals and collections in Aotearoa, Australia, America, Ireland and Asia. He was a finalist in the 2018 Emerging Poets, the featured poet for the Spring Edition of the New Zealand Poetry Society’s magazine a fine line, and a 2020 Vaughan Park Residential Scholar / Writer. He lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
Old Water Rat Publishing 